Social History of Art, Boxed Set: The Social History of Art: Naturalism, Impressionism, the Film Age

223 Pages·1999·2 MB·English

by  Arnold Hauser

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ART
VOLUME IV
‘As much a work of intellectual history as art history, Hauser’s work remains
unparalleled in its scope as a study of the relations between the forces of social change
and western art from its origins until the middle of the 20th century.’
Johanna Drucker, Professor of Art History, State University of New York
‘Harris’s introductions to each volume—dealing with Hauser’s aims, principles,
concepts and terms are extremely useful…. This edition should bring Hauser’s thought to
the attention of a new generation of readers.’
Whitney Davis, Professor of Art History, Northwestern University
First published in 1951 Arnold Hauser’s commanding work presents an account of the
development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the ‘Film
Age’. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social
and historical movements and sketches the framework within which visual art is
provided.
This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In
his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris assesses the
importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an
introduction to each volume provides a synopsis of Hauser’s narrative and serves as a
critical guide to the text, identifying major themes, trends and arguments.
Arnold Hauser was born in Hungary and studied literature and the history of art at the
universities of Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris. In 1921 he returned to Berlin to study
economics and sociology under Ernst Troeltsch. From 1923 to 1938 he lived in Vienna
where he began work on The Social History of Art. He lived in London from 1938 until
1977, when he returned to his native Hungary. He died in Budapest in 1978.
Jonathan Harris is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Critical Theory at the
University of Keele. He is the author of Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of
Identity in New Deal America (1995), co-author of Modernism in Dispute: Art Since The
Forties (1993) and co-editor of Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts
(1992).
The Social History of Art
Arnold Hauser, with an introduction by Jonathan Harris
Volume I—From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
Volume II—Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
Volume III—Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
Volume IV—Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ART
VOLUME IV
Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age
Arnold Hauser
with an introduction by Jonathan Harris

London and New York
First published in two volumes 1951
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.”
Second edition published in four volumes 1962 by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc
© 1951, 1962, 1999 The Estate of Arnold Hauser Introductions © 1999
Routledge
Translated in collaboration with the author by Stanley Godman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been
requested
ISBN 0-203-98182-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-19948-4 (Print Edition) (Vol. IV)
ISBN 0-415-19945-X (Print Edition) (Vol. I)
ISBN 0-415-19946-8 (Print Edition) (Vol. II)
ISBN 0-415-19947-6 (Print Edition) (Vol. III)
ISBN 0-415-21386-X (Set)
CONTENTS

List of illustrations vi
General introduction viii
Introduction to volume IV xx

I Naturalism and impressionism 1
1 The generation of 1830 1
2 The Second Empire 35
3 The social novel in England and Russ 62
4 Impressioni 110

II The Film Age 145
Notes 165
Index 173
ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate I. MONET: Gare Saint-Lazare. New York, Maurice Wertheim

1 Collection. Photo Vizzavona

2 MANET: The Road-Members of the Rue de Berne. Mrs.

R.A.Butler Collection. Photo Courtauld Inst.

II. 1 MONET: Rouen Cathedral. Paris, Louvre. Photo Bulloz

2 PISSARRO: Boulevard des Italiens. Photo Durand-Ruel

III RENOIR: Dancing in the Moulin de la Galette. Paris, Louvre.

Photo Chevojon

IV. 1 DEGAS: Before the Tribunes. Paris, Louvre. Photo Vizzavona

2 TOULOUSE-LAUTREC: The Jockey. Photo Vizzavona

3 TOULOUSE-LAUTREC: Jane Avril. Paris, Louvre. Photo

Vizzavona

V. 1 DEGAS: Place de la Concorde. Berlin, Gerstenberg Collection.

Photo Durand-Ruel

2 MONET: Anglers near Poissy. Photo Durand-Ruel

VI. 1 CÉZANNE: Gustav Geffroy. Paris, Lecomte-Pellerin Collection.

Photo Vizzavona

2 CÉZANNE: Lac d’Annecy. London, Courtauld Institute. Photo

The Arts Council of Great Britain

VII. 1 DEGAS: The Tub. Paris, Louvre. Photo Vizzavona

2 GAUGUIN: Otahi. Photo Vizzavona
3 VAN GOGH: The Railway Bridge of Arles. Porto Ronco,

E.M.Remarque Collection. Photo Vizzavona

VIII. 1 GEORGES BRAQUE: Still Life. Paris, Musée National d’Art

moderne. Photo Arch. Photogr. d’Art et d’Hist.

2 PICASSO: Tête antique. Paris. Musée National d’Art moderne.

Photo Vizzavona

3 PICASSO: Aubade.Paris, Musée National d’Art moderne. Photo

Vizzavona
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Jonathan Harris
Contexts of reception
Arnold Hauser’s The Social History of Art first appeared in 1951, published in two
volumes by Routledge and Kegan Paul. The text is over 500,000 words in length and
presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone
Age to the ‘Film Age’ of Hauser’s own time. Since its publication, Hauser’s history has
been reprinted often, testament to its continuing popularity around the world over nearly
a half-century. From the early 1960s the study has been reprinted six times in a four-
volume series, most recently in 1995. In the period since the Second World War the
discipline of art history has grown and diversified remarkably, both in terms of the
definition and extent of its chosen objects of study, and its range of operative theories and
methods of description, analyses and evaluation. Hauser’s account, from one reading
clear in its affiliation to Marxist principles of historical and social understanding—the
centrality of class and class struggle, the social and cultural role of ideologies, and the
determining influence of modes of economic production on art—appeared at a moment
when academic art history was still, in Britain at least, an élite and narrow concern,
limited to a handful of university departments. Though Hauser’s intellectual background
was thoroughly soaked in mid-European socio-cultural scholarship of a high order, only a
relatively small portion of which was associated directly with Marxist or neo-Marxist
perspectives, The Social History of Art arrived with the Cold War and its reputation
quickly, and inevitably, suffered within the general backlash against political and
intellectual Marxism which persisted within mainstream British and American society
and culture until at least the 1960s and the birth of the so-called New Left. At this
juncture, its first ‘moment of reception’, Hauser’s study, actually highly conventional in
its definition and selection of artefacts deemed worthy of consideration, was liable to be
attacked and even vilified because of its declared theoretical and political orientation.
By the mid-1980s, a later version of Marxism, disseminated primarily through the
development of academic media and cultural studies programmes, often interwoven with
feminist, structuralist and psychoanalytic themes and perspectives, had gained (and
regained) an intellectual respectability in rough and ironic proportion to the loss of its
political significance in western Europe and the USA since the 1930s. Hauser’s study was
liable to be seen in this second moment of reception as an interesting, if, on the whole,
crude, antecedent within the development of a disciplinary specialism identified with
contemporary academic art and cultural historians and theorists such as Edward Said,
Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and T.J.Clark. By the 1980s, however, Hauser’s
orthodox choice of objects of study, along with his unquestioned reliance on the largely
unexamined category of ‘art’—seen by many adherents of cultural studies as inherently
reactionary—meant that, once again, his history could be dismissed, this time primarily
on the grounds of its both stated and tacit principles of selection. Yet The Social History
of Art, whatever its uneven critical fortunes and continuing marginal place in most
university courses, has remained an item, or an obstacle, to be read—or at least
dismissively referred to—within the study of the history of art. Why should this be the
case?
There are several different, though related, answers to this question. The sheer extent
and relative detail of reference in Hauser’s study—despite the narrowness of selection—
has comtnanded a certain amount of respect and attention. No comparable study exists in
the English language, though many attempts at a one-volume ‘history of art’ have been
made since Hauser’s magnum opus appeared. Most famous of these and certainly better
known, especially outside the Academy, is Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art, which was
actually published just before Hauser’s study.1 Unlike Hauser, however, Gombrich,
probably aware of the charge of reckless megalomania likely to be levelled at anyone
attempting such a task, shrewdly adopted the term ‘story’ for his title which connoted,
amongst other things, a modest declaration of unreliability. Gombrich admitted, by using
the word, that his pithy tale was evidently ‘made up’, an invention, and therefore, after a
point, ‘not to be trusted’. Hauser’s pleonastic History, on the other hand, offered no such
self-effacement and its seriousness was liable to be represented, especially in the Cold
War, as another dreary facet of doctrinal Marxism promulgated by one of its apologists in
the Free West. And Hauser’s text is undoubtedly hard-going, unrelieved by regular and
frequent section sub-divisions, only sparsely (and sometimes apparently arbitrarily)
illustrated, and with no specific references to illustrations in the text. In addition to these
failings the text itself was translated from German into English in usually a merely
adequate manner by Stanley Goodman, though with Hauser’s collaboration. Long
Germanic sentences, piling qualifying sub-clause upon sub-clause, within arguments
mounted at usually quite high levels of abstraction make reading The Social History of
Art sometimes seem like the exhausting ascent of a literary Everest, in painful contrast to
what amounts to an afternoon skip up Gombrich’s sunny and daisified hillock.
If it is the case that Hauser’s sheer ambition (megalomaniacal or not) to attempt to
write meaningfully on art from the Stone Age to the Film Age almost in itself warrants a
certain amount of cautious interest, however, and his command of research materials
ostensibly indicates a more than superficial understanding of the dozens of fields of study
necessarily implicated in such an account, then there is another reason for taking the
history seriously. This is the issue of the significance of his claim, finally stated clearly
only in the ultimate volume, that the entire effort is really directed towards trying to
understand ourselves and the present. However, Hauser omitted—and this was a serious
error—to begin his study with an introduction which might have made the intended
purpose and value of his work manifest for readers at the start of their arduous climb.
Though it might not have been at all evident from his first pages on cave painting and
paleolithic pottery, Hauser was trying, he says retrospectively, to use history to
understand the present. ‘What else could the point of historical research be?’, he asks
rhetorically. Although ‘we are faced with new situations, new ways of life and feel as if
we were cut off from the past’, it is knowledge of ‘the older works’, and knowledge of
our alienation from them, which can help us to find ‘an answer to the question: How can
we, how should one, live in the present age?’ (vol. IV: pp. 1–2). One may, relatively
productively, simply ‘dip into’ Hauser—in a way that one can not simply experience a